The mGive Foundation is celebrating its first year in business with some notable milestones. Over the past year, the 501(c)(3) public charity has supported campaigns for more than 500 nonprofit clients, formed extensive enough carrier relationships to reach about 290 million U.S. wireless subscribers and now processes 85 percent of all mobile donations in the United States.
Jenifer Snyder is the executive director of The mGive Foundation and an early pioneer in the mobile donations space. She founded the Mobile Giving Foundation in 2006, was instrumental in negotiating the first mobile donation agreements with carriers and helped create a set of standards for mobile giving campaigns. Snyder joined the mGive Foundation as its executive director in October 2009.
Synder spoke with Wireless Week about the mGive Foundation’s recent successes and what she expects for mobile donations in 2011. Below is an edited transcript of the discussion.
Wireless Week: I get press releases from you pretty regularly and it seems like you’re making some progress in the mobile donations space. What do you see as some of the foundation’s biggest accomplishments and milestones over the past year?
Jenifer Snyder: We formed the foundation in October of last year. There were a lot of folks that were skeptical we’d be able to pull off what we have in the past year because traditionally, the IRS and the wireless industry move so slowly. To start a 501(c)(3) public charity, receive carrier agreements to process donations with 100 percent pass through and to secure support behind all of our partners’ charity clients to actually work with us instead of other foundations out there – it was a real challenge and I am so thrilled, proud, excited that we were actually able to do that.
The wireless community is really supportive of charitable contributions and charitable campaigns. Wireless carriers make no money off these campaigns. It’s a drain on their resources; it takes resources away from revenue-driving campaigns and partners. Without our carrier supporters and partners, this channel wouldn’t be possible. And without our charitable clients and partners who believed in our vision, believed in our team, I don’t think we would have been able to make it to where we are today.
WW: The disaster in Haiti really put mobile donations on the map. Did it help raise the profile of the mGive Foundation?
Snyder: I think that Haiti was definitely the tipping point for the mobile channel generally. The partnership we had with the American Red Cross made us more visible than others, but we’ve had great success with other clients as well – we helped Keep a Child Alive raise $400,000 in three minutes. I think one of the important drivers that we learned from Haiti is that mobile works as a communications channel. That’s really what we’re trying to help charities focus on. Yes, it’s a fundraising tool, but we’re trying to make it a more effective and innovative fundraising tool.
The mobile channel is a way to reach donors and constituencies that normally you can’t communicate with. If you look at the open rate for non-profits, it’s less than 10 percent for the e-mails they send out. When you look at text messages, 85 percent of text messages are read within 15 minutes. If you look at an e-mail that has a 10 percent or less chance of never being read and you look at a text message that has an 85 chance of being read within 15 minutes, that shows how effective text messaging is as far as communicating with constituencies.
Non-profits need to embrace mobile as part of their holistic communications strategy. It needs to be e-mail, direct mail, telephone solicitations, large events, in-venue events and it also has to include mobile. Forty percent of the donors who are giving through mobile right now are new, nontraditional donors who otherwise haven’t communicated with organizations. We have to look at that metric, capture it and learn how to cultivate a new group. The generosity of spirit exists. It’s a matter of engaging in the correct communications pathways to call upon that generosity, whether that’s generosity of time, generosity of funds or generosity of advocacy, mobile is a way to capture a new audience. That’s what we’re really focusing on.
WW: One thing I was thinking of as you were talking about those e-mails was that text messages may have a higher open rate but you can’t put a whole lot of information in a text message. How do you handle the basic physical limitations of the text messages itself?
Snyder: There isn’t a real good chance we’re going to be able to expand that character limit, so we’re going to figure out the best way to optimize those messages. It’s a great and effective channel to thank donors who have given not just funds but who have given biomedical donations or who have participated in some way in a donation event. It’s a great way to thank donors, to cultivate that relationship and give them a positive experience. It’s also a good way to push out information, like if you want to let people know where a shelter is in their area, like with the Boulder, Colo., fires. It’s a way to communicate with people on the fly during disasters, to let them know where to go.
WW: What attracts charities to the mGive Foundation specifically? I can see that charities are attracted to your offerings in particular and I’m wondering what sets you apart from the other groups out there doing similar mobile donation work.
Snyder: Our foundation processes about 85 percent of all mobile donations that are going through the channel currently, so we by far handle the most traffic. Our partners and ourselves have the most robust platform on the market. We are rated to handle 5,000 messages per second. During the Haiti disaster, some of our counterparts’ platforms actually stopped working for a time so nonprofits couldn’t collect donations, and ours did not go down. In fact, during our peak we ended up processing about 25,000 transactions per minute. We have a very robust platform, but we also have an amazing team with a breadth of experience when it comes to campaigns and knowing what’s worked in the past. We have a long track record of knowing how to make these campaigns work and what’s worked in the past.
Beyond that, we have some of the most innovative and strategic technology partners out there. What we look to do is really generate partners so we can create a mobile storefront for nonprofits. If a nonprofit comes to us and they largely do event-based fundraisers, like [Susan G. Komen] Race for the Cure or Aids Walk, we can partner that nonprofit up with someone who is excellent at LBS interactive maps that can handle staged events. Then what we can do is integrate a fundraising component in with that technology. We try to find the most innovative and strategic thinkers out there in the mobile sector and in other sectors, and marry those with nonprofit clients who are working with us so they can really leverage this technology.
WW: You operate as a nonprofit but you have to fund yourselves somehow. Do you collect any portion of the donations that you process? How are you funded?
Snyder: We operate a lot like a MasterCard or Visa gateway. We charge our ASP [application service provider] partners. Our largest ASP partner is mgive.com; they’re the largest mobile marketing agency for nonprofits out there. We collect a per transaction service fee from them. We collect 10 cents per message or a donation from them; what they do is go out and market their services to nonprofits. One of the services they offer their clients is the ability to fundraise through us, and we collect 10 cents from those transactions. 100 percent of the donation is received from the carriers by us, 100 percent is paid out to the nonprofit and then there’s a transaction fee that we assess to the mobile marketing company, which passes through to their clients in the long run. It’s part of a larger suite of services that they’re engaged to have.
WW: You guys tested the $25 donation level. Can you talk to me a little bit about the results you saw from the $25 donation level?
Snyder: We’re in the midst of the trial. ACLJ [American Center for Law and Justice] and the American Red Cross are participating in the trial. The trial ends on Dec. 31, and what we’re doing right now is we’re in the midst of a survey of donors. We’re doing a research study to try and better understand donors, their behavior and what they would like to see from the mobile channel and from nonprofits. We should have those results in January and February of next year. The second phase of that study is that we’re going to take the $25 price point and see how it impacts those donors; how the behavior of donors who are participating changes. We’re really trying to understand if that $25 price point is the sweet spot for mobile giving. For many nonprofits it’s definitely the sweet spot for direct mail, so we’re just trying to assess whether that translates into the mobile sphere. So far the results have been really great – the two nonprofits have been very happy with the success, but we really won’t know until February or March the full impact.
The $25 price point is going to be a huge impact on subscriber’s bills, and so we need to asses whether refund rates are impacted and whether or not wireless carriers have a spending cap on the amount of money you can charge to your cell phone bill. We need to better understand whether we end up losing donors because that price point is high or whether it has no impact on the number of donations we receive. We really want to understand the impact on wireless carriers, nonprofits and donor response so we know whether or not it’s an effective price point going forward.
WW: Looking forward, what do you see ahead for the mGive Foundation?
Snyder: We have some really robust goals but they kind of hit in basic areas. We really want to improve the effectiveness of existing campaigns and new campaigns. We’re doing some research studies to understand what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, what donors are thinking and what they’d like to see. Along with improving the effectiveness of the channel, we also want to analyze, research and educate the wireless community and the nonprofit community about how to use this channel more effectively.
Another goal that we have is to really increase the reach of mobile giving through partnerships with additional wireless carriers. Right now, the major carriers are on board and we service a large number of the smaller carriers, but we’re constantly looking for partnerships with rural carriers so that way we can really canvas the nation and allow everyone to participate in charitable campaigns through mobile. For instance, the Red Cross could have a push to let folks know in affected areas where shelters and relief services are available to them, and in rural areas we may not have the reach because there’s not a roaming agreement in place with that carrier, so we’re really trying to ensure that we have relationships with all carriers possible.
Another goal is to innovate the channel. Mobile giving 2.0 is sort of our mantra. What we want to do is constantly forge and find new technology partners. We’re looking at how can we use location-based technology to further optimize the channel. We’re also trying to determine whether or not and how handset-based applications could be more effective. There currently are branded iPhone applications, but are there additional ways we could brand applications for nonprofits so that they really cultivate supporters. We also want to use GPS mapping and satellite tools so we can asses whether or not there are additional functionalities we can offer to nonprofits that would help optimize their campaigns and drive further innovation.
We’re also working on alternative payment mechanism through mobile. There are a lot of ways that you can use mobile to collect funds, and we’re reaching out to strategic partners to see if there are additional ways that we could help nonprofits leverage the mobile phones to collect funds from their donors. PayPal Mobile would be a great example: How would it be best to incorporate PayPal Mobile into an ongoing mobile campaign so that we could offer a higher price point or maybe incorporate credit cards instead of a premium text message donation?
I think this is the most effective tool for communicating with constituencies, especially 18- to 35-year-olds. I want to increase the adoption rate with nonprofits, I want to evangelize this product because communicating through mobile could be one of the saviors for nonprofit communications in the future. I really want to work to optimize the uptake of this technology.
